Rightwing Chilean newspaper accused of 'apology for Nazism' over Goring article
Germany embassy condemns El Mercurio for Sunday piece and says ‘no room to justify or minimise his horrific role’
John Bartlett in Santiago
Mon 25 Oct 2021 12.53 EDT
Chile’s main conservative daily newspaper has been accused of publishing “an apology for Nazism” after running an illustrated article commemorating the life of the German war criminal Hermann Göring.
After El Mercurio published the article on Sunday, the German embassy in Santiago expressed its concern, highlighting Göring’s many crimes.
. . .
El Mercurio is the modern incarnation of Chile’s oldest newspaper, founded in the port city of Valparaíso in 1827.
It received CIA funding during the socialist government of Salvador Allende (1970-73) to undermine the president’s economic reforms. The newspaper supported the 1973 coup which deposed Allende and ushered in General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, and published consistently in favour of the military government until the return to democracy in 1990.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/25/chile-newspaper-el-mercurio-hermann-goring
~ ~ ~
Documenting U.S. Role in Democracy’s Fall and Dictator’s Rise in Chile
A phone in the exhibition “Secrets of State: The Declassified History of the Chilean Dictatorship” at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile. Visitors can pick up the receiver to hear a recreation of a conversation between former President Richard M. Nixon and his national security Adviser, Henry Kissinger.Credit...Tomas Munita for The New York Times
By Pascale Bonnefoy
Oct. 14, 2017
SANTIAGO, Chile — An old rotary phone rings insistently.
Visitors at a new exhibition at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights here in Santiago who pick up the receiver hear two men complain bitterly about the liberal news media “bleating” over the military coup that had toppled Salvador Allende, the Socialist president of Chile, five days earlier.
. . .“Our hand doesn’t show on this one, though,” one says.
“We didn’t do it,” the other responds. “I mean, we helped them.”
. . .
Nearby, copies of the front pages of dozens of newspapers from the Pinochet era hang from a panel simulating a kiosk. They were all published by the conservative media empire El Mercurio, which received at least $2 million from the C.I.A. The records in the exhibition also profile Pinochet, trace intelligence gathering on brutal state-sponsored repression and detail how the Reagan government abandoned Pinochet to his fate in 1988, fearing a further radicalization of the opposition.
“These documents have helped us rewrite Chile’s contemporary history,” said Francisco Estévez, director of the museum. “This exhibit is a victory in the fight against negationism, the efforts to deny and relativize what happened during our dictatorship.”
. . .
“To see on a piece of paper, for example, the president of the United States ordering the C.I.A. to preemptively overthrow a democratically elected president in Chile is stunning,” Mr. Kornbluh said. “The importance of having these documents in the museum is for the new generations of Chileans to actually see them.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/14/world/americas/chile-coup-cia-museum.html
